Posts Tagged: Workflow

Smashing Magazine recently added a post to their site from Paul Boag which is a must read! It reiterates many of the reasons why our department began incorporating the developers into our initial conversations when developing websites.

In addition, the article reinforces the idea that we should stop seeing developers as the enemy or “those people” but rather as allies to the cause of creating creative and effective websites.

We’ve all heard it before: good design is hard. Good web design not only has to look amazing, but it also has to be functional, often without the knowledge of what platform or resolution your design is even going to be used on. Responsive web design – a simple concept at its core – gave web designers and developers the opportunity to account for the unknown. We perfected the use of media queries, installed respond.js to account for the IE holdouts and core concepts were adopted.

The basic structure of responsive design is usually a 3-2-1 pattern. Main content and sidebars are eventually reduced to one long vertical column of information on our phones. And while this is responsive web design, it’s disheartening to think that’s all we can do to make our sites work well on all devices. So I want to challenge us all to design beyond the vertical; to think about the other aspects that go into making a well-designed responsive site.

For a (frequently hilarious) gallery of mobile fail, the appropriately-named WTF Mobile Web site is a good way to waste an hour (and maybe learn from someone else’s mistakes at the same time). Mostly it’s a simple blog of screenshots from websites or apps that just don’t handle mobile devices very well. Check it out.

However, buried in the “About” page for this little blog is a very perceptive summary of the challenges that mobile devices create for web designers:

The problem isn’t any one person. The problem is that we’ve all been doing this thing called Making a Website for a long time in a particular way. And now everything is changing. Sure some developers are resistant to learning new things, but most developers are interested, excited and willing. But this isn’t a problem that you can fix by just switching out which bit of code to use. It’s bigger than that. Content strategy, design, business all have to change. The fundamental way in which people work together to plan and coordinate the creation of a website has to change. It’s not easy to go into work one day and say to a big team, “Hey, uh, we need to restructure our design process and completely change what we are doing with our mobile web strategy. Uh, why? Yeah, just because.”